In a wired world with abundant eyes, vanished jet vexes and perplexes

Saturday

Mar 22, 2014 at 7:06 PM

By Chris Buckley THE NEW YORK TIMES

SEPANG, Malaysia — A satellite image of an indistinct, pale object floating in the ocean far off the west coast of Australia, published Saturday by the Chinese authorities, is the latest of a succession of elusive clues in what has become one of aviation's greatest mysteries.

In an era when satellites, cellphones and radar would seem to be everywhere, a 328-ton jetliner nearly 200 feet from wingtip to wingtip has vanished, and for nearly two weeks searchers have not found a single material indication of its fate.

Vague shapes photographed by satellites above the southern Indian Ocean appear to be the likeliest lead so far, but they, too, may turn out to be mirages, like a succession of previous false sightings of the plane, a Boeing 777-200, and rumors about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared about 40 minutes after takeoff March 8.

On Saturday, the Chinese government said one of its satellites had spotted an "unusual object" on Tuesday in an area where Australia had organized a search. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Chinese planes and ships would try to reach the area and look for the whitish object, about 74 feet by 43 feet. It was spotted about 65 nautical miles southwest of the spot where, two days earlier, another satellite captured similar images of floating objects, which the Australian government said might be wreckage from the jet.

"It looks consistent with what the Australian picture shows," said Sean O'Connor, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who is a consultant to IHS Jane's for imagery analysis, after comparing the pictures released by both governments. Currents may have pushed the object to a new location during that time, he said.

The coordinates provided with the Chinese satellite images are highly consistent with the location of the last recorded "ping" that Inmarsat, a satellite communications company, detected from the missing plane, according to one person familiar with the coordinates that Inmarsat submitted to Malaysian investigators. Inmarsat declined to comment.

But debris in the ocean can sink or simply elude searchers, especially in vast and often rough waters. Late Saturday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which has coordinated the hunt in the southern Indian Ocean, said the location reported by the Chinese government fell within a search zone that ships and planes had patrolled that day. "The object was not sighted on Saturday," the authority said in an email.

The continuing uncertainty, with no conclusive evidence of what happened to the plane and the people on it, has tormented relatives of those on board and flummoxed aviation experts, security policymakers and travelers.

More than two dozen countries are on the hunt from land, air, space and sea for any visible scrap of wing, tail or engine. Investigators from law enforcement and aviation safety agencies from across the world have combed through the backgrounds of all the passengers, and have revealed no potential suspects.

The search is of such complexity and reach that most countries would struggle to manage it.

Many aviation safety experts and some government officials have said the Malaysian government's sometimes maladroit handling of the crisis, including miscommunication between its military and its civilian government and the seemingly poor grasp of detail, have magnified uncertainty and confusion about the plane's fate.

The search has demanded cooperation from governments crisscrossed by mutual distrust and, in some cases, outright enmity. Malaysia has urged them to focus on finding the plane, but officials of some other governments have privately accused Malaysia of hesitancy in putting that ahead of worries about security and plain pride.

French officials said March 9 that they had offered their help. But no response was received from the Malaysians for the better part of a week, and it was not until last Sunday that France announced that a team of three investigators from its Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses had departed for Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, to share expertise gleaned from the two-year search for an Air France jet that disappeared off the coast of Brazil in 2009.

The Malaysians have kept U.S. investigators at a distance since the plane vanished March 8, angering some lawmakers in Washington who believe the FBI should have been playing a larger role from the beginning. A small team of FBI agents in Malaysia has received briefings on the investigation, but it has not been asked to help.

As recently as last weekend, U.S. aviation investigators in Malaysia told the government there that it was searching for the plane in the wrong areas, and that it needed to redirect its search to the Indian Ocean, according to a person briefed on the inquiry. The U.S. investigators were also concerned that the Malaysian officials were not sharing all the information they had from their radar systems, the person said.

The U.S. investigators believe the Malaysian government was reluctant to share information with them because they fear exposing their weak radar and satellite systems. It took the Malaysians several days to share data from the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS, which collected information from the plane that was relayed to the ground before it vanished from civilian radar, the person said. Typically, that information is shared with investigators and other countries in the day or so after a plane has crashed or disappeared.

The data collected by the ACARS system showed that the first turn to the west that diverted the plane from its planned path was carried out through a computer system that was most likely programmed by someone in the cockpit. Flight 370 was about 40 minutes into a six-hour red-eye trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing when it stopped communicating with air traffic controllers and turned far off course, cutting back across peninsular Malaysia toward the Indian Ocean. With few leads to go on, countries cooperating in the search have sometimes sniped at one another. Even Chinese officials, usually reluctant to upbraid friendly Southeast Asian countries publicly, have criticized the Malaysians' handling of the inquiry.